subsidies

In advance of Tuesday's election, I thought it would be useful to have a quick look at Mitt Romney's vision for the country's energy future. This blog post provides links to other assessments of his broader energy plan that I think do a nice job framing some important issues, and then discusses Romney's statements about subsidies to clean energy. Part 2, which won't be ready for a couple more days, will look some critical deficits in Romney's statements about subsidies to oil and gas, and provide guidance on important subsidies he is overlooking and why these matter.

The report provides an extremely detailed review of policies within France that have the effect of harming biodiversity, though does not rank these subsidies in terms of which are most damaging. The report looks at a vast array of policies that encourage urban sprawl, over-exploitation of resources, and the introduction of exotic species, in the process triggering habitat loss. The analysis also looks at subsidies to pollution. Although the authors were able to quantify many specific subsidy items, they were not able to present an aggregate tally due to the complexity of some of the prog

The US Supreme Court has just greatly loosened the restrictions on spending corporate cash on political candidates and elections. The onslaught of cash that will follow will, I suspect, suprise even the supporters of this change. More importantly, the web of obligations that this cash creates among the elected officials will greatly worsen an already out-of-control problem of subsidies to favored constituencies.

The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2009 provides the reader with the basic quantitative and qualitative facts on the nuclear power plants in operation, under construction and in planning phases throughout the world.

"Absolutely not," says Doug Koplow of the Cambridge, Mass.-based group
Earth Track. He pointed to the fact that biofuel plantations often
require the destruction of rainforests, causing greater net carbon
emissions and destroying animal habitats. “You can say we’re growing
crops for biofuels from pre-existing farmland, but then the offsetting
food production begins to cut into natural habitat," he added.

This chapter reviews the major policy developments affecting the fuel-ethanol industry of the United States since the late 1970s, quantifies their value to the industry, and evaluates the efficacy of ethanol subsidization in achieving greenhouse gas reduction goals. Total support to ethanol is currently substantial ($5.8-7.0 billion in 2006) and set to rise sharply even under existing policy settings. However, its cost effectiveness is low, especially as a means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

This
is one of ten studies for the Copenhagen Consensus Project that sought
to evaluate the most feasible opportunities to improve welfare globally
and alleviate poverty in developing countries. It argues that phasing
out distortionary government subsidies and barriers to international
trade will yield an extraordinarily high benefit to cost ratio.